VMware's New Federal Chief Cloud Executive Has Proven Cloud Chops

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Doug Bourgeois, the new vice president and Federal Chief Cloud Executive for VMware, has earned his cloud chops.

Before coming to VMware two months ago, he implemented a massive cloud solutions overhaul for government agencies as the director of the U.S. Department of The Interior's National Business Center.

In that role, he spearheaded a successful effort to bring an extensive cloud solution portfolio to federal agencies. Under Bourgeois' leadership, the National Business Center put in place infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service offerings. That led to huge cost savings for government agencies.

But that successful cloud experience also came with some battle scars.

Bourgeois said the National Business Center's primary data center in Denver, Colorado, which housed the organization's cloud solutions, went down in July 2008 leading to a 24-hour outage for some 300,000 government employees. The outage also caused core financial applications for 38 agencies to go dark.

"(It happened) even though we had done everything we needed to do by co-ordinating with the power company and telling them every change we made and coordinating every design and increased draw of the power into the data center," Bourgeois said. "We were changing things rapidly, added in some power distribution units and started to draw more power and we brought down the Grid."

"The data center went dark," said Bourgeois. "So what happened? We had to execute our disaster recovery plan."